Word: fonda
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...describes might not be just Norman Thayer Jr., but Spencer Tracy. Or Henry Jaynes Fonda. One of this film's reverberant pleasures comes from watching Fonda play what might have been a Tracy role if Spencer had lived a dozen or so more years. Norman, after all, possesses the hearty irascibility that Tracy seemed born with, and that Fonda achieved only in the making of On Golden Pond. At the beginning of the film, as Fonda lumbers about in gusts of frail menace, he angles toward playing a New England Lear with overcareful pungency. One gets the sense of Fonda...
...Critic Manny Farber wrote that Fonda "seems to be vouchsafing his emotion and talent to the audience in tiny blips... Fonda's entry into a scene is that of a man walking backward, slanting himself away from the public eye." Playing almost any character early in his career, Fonda seemed profoundly ill at ease. It amounted to a compact with the movie audience that he was one of them: callow, inarticulate, salt-of-the-earth, or if need be, soul-of-the-nation. This social squirm served him well, in comic or dramatic roles...
...Jesse James (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Fonda is virtually cornered into renegade political activism; a corrupt System flays him, but under the vulnerable Midwestern skin is a species of American hero. In his best comedy, The Lady Eve (1941), Fonda is the perfect patsy for a con woman, Barbara Stanwyck?so perfect that she falls in love with the sap. Watching Fonda writhe under Stanwyck's bogus endearments remains one of the high delights of screwball farce...
...Mister Roberts (on stage 1948-51, on screen 1955) he could still show surprise that the men of the U.S.S. Reluctant would confer so much moral authority on him. But from then on the Fonda character was at ease with his place in American history, whether as a lone righteous juror in 12 Angry Men, or as any number of military men, government officials?and desperadoes...
Through age and exposure, The Wrong Man had become The Best Man. It was a role that life had carved in Fonda, the quiet son of a pleasant, rigorous Christian Scientist family in Omaha in the century's first decade...